In the field of information technology (IT) services, services between entities are acquired by means of service agreements. When a prospective service client submits an agreement offer, a service provider must assess whether it can comply with the agreement offer and, if so, provision the necessary IT resources for the service to be delivered. IT resources include, for example, storage, computing and networking elements.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,148,290 to Dan et al., the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein, teaches the use of service agreements to automate the delivery of services between autonomous entities. A service agreement may define penalties and rewards associated with breaking or achieving service level objectives related to the service. In this case, the IT resource configuration of a provider set up for the delivery of an agreement must implement the service in the way that it trades off rewards received and penalties incurred with the costs of IT resource usage.
Formal representations of agreements enable the automatic interpretation of service agreements. WS-Agreement (see, e.g., A. Andrieux et al, “Web Services Agreement Specification,” version 1.1, draft 18, May 2004, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein) is a draft for a standard representation of service agreements and can be used in combination with service type specific representations, e.g., the Web Service Description Language (see, e.g., E. Christensen et al., “Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1,” World Wide Web Consortium Technical Report, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein). The Web Services Offer Language is another representation to the same end (see, e.g., V. Tosic et al, “WSOL—A Language for the Formal Specification of Classes of Service for Web Services,” Proceedings of 2003 International Conference on Web Services, CSREA Press, pp. 375-381, June 2003, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein).
Deriving the set of resources, or alternative sets of resources necessary for implementing a service agreement, and subsequently provisioning this set, is essential for automating the process of automatically fulfilling service agreements. A. Dan et al, “Connecting Client Objectives with Resource Capabilities: An Essential Component for Grid Service Management Infrastructures,” International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) 2004, pp. 57-64, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein, teaches an approach how to translate performance objectives in multiple steps into resource requirements. However, the proposed approach per se does not automate the derivation. For each particular domain, e.g., computing job scheduling, a specific resource derivation model has to be defined and implemented by a programmer. The approach gives guidance how to do this, though it does not automate the resource requirement derivation by itself. Furthermore, it does not solve the provisioning problem.
Lastly, while there are template-based provisioning approaches available from such companies as AdventNet (Pleasanton, Calif.), Cisco (San Jose, Calif.) and Veritas (Mountain View, Calif.), these approaches do not take into account service agreements.